Your guide to LinkedIn marketing for multi-location brands

With up to 690 million members, it’s clear that LinkedIn has experienced an impressive amount of growth over the years. When multi-location brands think about their social media strategy, LinkedIn usually isn’t top of mind for most businesses. However, a LinkedIn social media strategy can help your brand target the right audience, establish your business as an industry leader, and drive customers.

4 Steps for Multi-location Brands to Linkedin Growth

Widely known as a “recruiting platform”, one of the most overlooked traits of LinkedIn is the powerful connections and relationships that can be created for brands. LinkedIn’s strength as a professional network can be leveraged to effectively outreach to decision-makers, engage with professionals, and showcase your company’s culture. Check out these stats that highlight the benefits of creating a LinkedIn social media strategy:

• LinkedIn is capable of generating 3 times more conversions than the top social networking platforms.
• 55% of decision-makers use LinkedIn content to vet organizations
• 52% of buyers list LinkedIn as the most influential channel in their research process

1 – Optimize Your Company Profile

Unlike other platforms, like Instagram, the best practice for multi-location brands is to have one company page for your brand, with all your locations listed on the company page. Adding all of your brand’s locations will increase your company’s visibility in search results when LinkedIn users search for related services near their location. It’s also important to note that if you’re an organization with various brands working under you,  each brand will need a separate company page. A social media management tool like Social Suite can help your company stay on top of all brands and locations by monitoring it from a single dashboard.

Having an optimized company page and profile might seem obvious, but it’s important to have an eye-catching company profile to attract users. Start with making sure that your page’s cover photo, tagline, and logo are in line with your brand.

These aspects of your page will be the first thing LinkedIn members will see and can be used in a few different ways. In these two examples, Walmart features their current employees and their infamous tagline, while Netflix takes an alternative approach to engage potential employees.

Your cover photos can also take an actionable approach. You can feature a call-to-action on any company announcements or products worth sharing. Next, you’ll want to fill out the other subsections including the: “About”, “Life”, “Jobs”, and “People”. The “About” section of your company’s page should be completely filled out with your basic information, with links to your website as well as keywords related to your industry in the “Specialities” section. The “Life” section is your chance to share your company’s culture and environment. You can describe values and ideals important to the company, feature employee testimonials, add company photos, and highlight what makes your company unique. The “People” tab gives your audience a demographic breakdown of certain factors like your team’s location, education, skills, and employers listed.

Taking the time to ensure your company page is filled out with accurate and up to date information will help viewers understand who your brand is. Sections like “Life” and “People” are unique to LinkedIn and give you the chance to provide a deeper story of your company. It’s also important to note that multiple audiences exist on LinkedIn – and your aim is to attract all different audiences. Your page will need to speak in the language of potential employees, recruiters, competitors, customers, prospects, and industry leaders.

So how can your brand ensure it can speak to all of these audiences? The answer lies in the content you share. By having the right mix of content for these various audience types, your brand can engage generate more interest.

2 – Step Up Your Content for Brand Credibility and Engagement

LinkedIn is the #1 channel marketers use to distribute content at 94%. Engaging your LinkedIn audience with the right content mix is a must-do on LinkedIn. When you take a look at some of the most followed companies on LinkedIn like Google, Microsoft, and Apple, you can see that there are recurring themes among all brands when it comes to their content. These themes can be used on any social media platform, but specifically, cater to the different audiences on LinkedIn.

Video Content – Over half of marketing professionals agree that video content produces the best ROI. Creating video content for LinkedIn doesn’t have to be costly or timely. You can use your phone or a camera on hand to give a behind the scenes update, interview employees, or preview your brand’s next product or event. In the example below, Juneshine went to LinkedIn to announce new information about their product. You can also take advantage of LinkedIn Live – the only form of content that is more engaging than video on LinkedIn. With LinkedIn Live, you can conduct fireside chats, product releases, Q&A sessions, best practices, and much more.

Socially Conscious Initiatives – COVID-19, climate change, and other societal issues have accelerated the social change consumers expect out of brands today. 75% of millennials have altered their buying habits to align with the environment while 63% of Gen Z consumers state they’re more likely to buy from a company that contributes to a social cause. Highlighting any social, environmental, or other initiatives on LinkedIn will give consumers the confidence they’re purchasing from a brand they believe in.

Knowledge & Insights – Showcase your brand’s industry expertise by sharing valuable resources and providing knowledge. LinkedIn users seek out information that provides value. That’s why marketers who put their audience’s informational needs first on LinkedIn make up an overwhelming 88% of the top performers in content marketing. Whitepapers, case studies, articles, trending stats, or any other content relevant to your industry are all great pieces of information to share. LinkedIn Slideshare and LinkedIn Publishing are other useful ways to upload decks, presentations, and articles to highlight your brand’s thought leadership. Don’t be afraid to also post a mix of other high-quality sources as well, this will help your brand appear less sales-y and build credibility.

Company Culture & Employee Voices – What separates one company from the rest? How do employees feel about the company they work at? What are some of the unique characteristics of a company’s culture? Questions like these are what LinkedIn members are truly interested in hearing and learning about. Highlighting your company’s culture doesn’t just interest potential employees – it brings your brand’s personality, core values, and work environment to life.

At Chatmeter, company culture is tremendously valuable to us and our employees make up a large aspect of it. We love to spotlight our employees on LinkedIn, from sharing the furry friends of our employees or exciting hobbies our team enjoys outside of work. No matter the size of your company, your brand can engage employees and other LinkedIn members by sharing moments like these or any other unique aspect of your company culture. This is an important element in establishing brand credibility and authority. After all, employees know their company the best, so it’s in every brand’s best interests to feature employees and give them a voice.

Every member on LinkedIn exists on the network for numerous reasons, but just like with any other social media platform, they’re also looking for personal connections, stories, knowledge, and inspiration. This is where LinkedIn content can be used as a driving force to incorporate all these values to attract a wider audience – and any industry can do it. Brands like IBM aren’t the most “personal” brands, but they have enjoyed tremendous LinkedIn success because of their human-centric content and personal touch.

3 – Continue to Connect with Your Audience

Creating compelling content is only part of a great LinkedIn social media strategy. It’s just as important, if not more, to build upon or generate more conversations about your brand. 71% of consumers who’ve had a good social media experience with a brand are more likely to recommend it to others. Using a tool like Chatmeter’s Social Suite not only helps you stay on top of responding back to your fans, but also with creating social media momentum. By responding faster to your audience, you can cultivate a larger conversation and ultimately generate more social buzz.

In addition, a tool like Social Suite can help your brand find employee and culture related conversations around your company to share. LinkedIn is one of the top networks where employees like to share their work-related experiences, which makes it a great platform to highlight your company culture from an employee perspective.

4 – Measure Your Brand’s LinkedIn Performance

What posts are your top performers and which see the least engagement? How many followers do you have? What’s your growth rate like? Tracking metrics and insights like these are crucial to your brand’s social media success. Although LinkedIn’s platform gives some data metrics, utilizing a robust analytics tool can help you dive deeper into your brand’s performance.

With Chatmeter, multi-location brands can get the full scope of your social analytics by viewing impressions, engagements, shares, and more. You can also build out reports to analyze and track your growth over time. This allows you to refine your social media strategy confidently, with intelligent data behind your decisions.

Growing your LinkedIn social media presence requires time, resources, and a creative mix of content. LinkedIn’s audience, features, and functionality make it a vastly different social media network than other platforms. By leveraging a tool like Chatmeter’s Social Suite, your brand can have a seamless multi-location presence on LinkedIn with the ability to bulk publish, engage with fans, and track analytics all in one dashboard.